The Invisible Aggressive Fist: Features of Cyberbullying Language in China

Abstract

With the rapid development of the social media, cyberbullying has become an invisible aggressive fist worldwide, leading to many tragedies. Compared with abundant findings on the description, detection and prevention of cyberbullying targeted at teenagers from the perspectives of sociology, psychology and computer science, little has been done to analyze how adults are linguistically bullied on the social media. This paper, based on the data collected from a high-profile case in China, aims to analyze the features of cyberbullying language that is targeted at adults on the social media. Data analysis shows that online users tend to choose particular forms of address to identify the victim and employ lexical and grammatical evaluative resources to negate the victim and conduct trial by social media. Through interactions among participants online and offline, the negative effects of cyberbullying may be achieved, realizing, ironically, the function of language, “to do things with words”. This study may hopefully enrich the linguistic findings on cyberbullying and provide tentative linguistic parameters for future empirical studies on automatic detection of cyberbullying.